Globe Telecom Transforms Data Into 24/7 Single-Pane-of-Glass Visibility

Delivering superior customer experience is paramount in the telecom industry.

That’s why Globe Telecom insists on running an unfailing, round-the-clock IT operation. Currently the largest mobile network operator and a leading fixed-line and broadband network provider in the Philippines, the company has to monitor 180 business systems and 2,000 servers throughout the company while catching every technical glitch before an outage occurs or service erodes.

“We wanted to monitor our networks, applications and databases from a single pane of glass so we could keep a watchful eye on our systems 24 hours a day, seven days per week — without missing any critical alert,” says Joseph Manalang, service operations intelligence center manager at Globe Telecom. “This enables us to offer seamless services and enhance end-user satisfaction.”

80% Faster Results With 40% Fewer Resources

After trying a few options, Globe Telecom chose the Splunk platform without hesitation. “We can now replace 20 monitoring screens with a centralized framework and investigate events through a single, at-a-glance view while displaying data-driven analytics results on highly customizable and intuitive dashboards,” says Manalang. “Every colleague now accesses data easily and brings data to every well-informed decision. Also impressive is the service-based approach that Splunk offers, which is a perfect match with our business model.”

Manalang also shares some “magic numbers” Splunk helped their team achieve: “In the past we put five skilled people on system monitoring, but now three is enough.” As the company used to outsource monitoring tasks to a service provider, that means it has saved 40% of costs and resources. While it previously took 85 minutes to detect incidents in tier-one systems and direct them to the right response team, now everything is done in only 15 minutes — more than 80% faster. Incident reporting time was also cut in half, from two hours to one. Users easily read incident reports on their mobile devices and browsers and gain full visibility into the severity of the issue anytime, anywhere.

Globe Telecom has also deployed Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), which further leverages machine learning and powerful visualizations to safeguard its IT operations and achieve service excellence.

From Reactive Problem Solving to Proactive Insight Sharing

By revolutionizing their incident detection timeline, Globe Telecom also successfully reduced the mean time to recovery; and by identifying problems before receiving user complaints, the company has strengthened customer trust and loyalty. But Splunk’s contribution is not only to streamline workflows and shorten investigation cycles. Its ability to turn data into transformative insights has also created real values for different stakeholders.

“Splunk lets us go beyond IT management and allows us to strive for more unprecedented possibilities, benefiting our business in more proactive ways,” says Manalang. Apart from monitoring infrastructure status, for example, the team can now capture transaction status as well, which facilitates real-time measurement of key performance indicators. “You can’t imagine how flexible the Splunk dashboard is,” says Manalang. “All stakeholders gain real-time visibility into the operations easily. We can even know the potential revenue loss of every single incident, besides the root cause and consequence.”

The Splunk solution brings great value to internal users, too. “Through predictive analytics, we are able to share actionable insights and useful precautions with different business groups before they launch new projects and events. In other words, we have migrated from reactive problem solving to proactive insight sharing. We have gone beyond defense,” Manalang says.

Pushing the Boundaries

With Splunk, Globe Telecom’s digitalization is progressing by leaps and bounds. In the days to come, the company will continue to rely on real-time monitoring to improve its operations and sharpen its competitive edge in today’s customer-centric environment.

“To fully maximize the value of Splunk, we are planning to move from issue detection to remediation, making error monitoring more actionable with real-time incident response,” says Manalang. “That means we will be able to automatically detect, prioritize, diagnose and get to the heart of performance issues that are disrupting normal service operation. With everything becoming automated on the Splunk platform, we look forward to redirecting human resources away from the command center in the immediate future.”

Globe Telecom also plans to enhance its search and investigation capabilities while using advanced analytics to anticipate problems better. Splunk will continue to play a critical role in aligning functions, enabling agility, spurring innovation and empowering Globe Telecom to use big data to seek out the next big thing.